Twenty years ago, Arundhati Roy wrote her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, which went on to become one of the best loved books of our time. June 2017 will see Roy's return to fiction with her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.How to tell a shattered story?By slowly becoming everybody.No.By slowly becoming everything.In a city graveyard a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two gravesAs a private joke, never the same two on consecutive nights.On a concrete sidewalk a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litterNo angels sang, no wise men brought gifts, but a million stars appeared in the east to herald her arrival.In a snowy valley where tombstones grew through the ground like young children's teeth, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people that attended her funeralHow shall I explain one hundred thousand to you? You who could only count to fifty-nine? Shall we try and think about it seasonally? In spring think of how many red poppies blossom in the meadowsIn a second-floor apartment, watched over by a small owl, a lone woman feeds a baby gecko dead mosquitoes"What I should have been", she thought, "is a gecko feeder".And in the Jannat Guest House, two people who've known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around one another as though they have only just met.Arundhati Roy's new novel gives us a cast of unforgettable characters, caught up in the tide of history, each in search of a place of safety. It is at once a love story and a provocation, an emotional embrace and a decisive remonstration. It is told with a whisper, with a shout, with tears and with a laugh. Its heroes, both present and departed, human as well as animal, have been broken by the world we live in and then mended by love. And for this reason, they will never surrender.The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells a shattered story, magnificently, without ever trying to make it whole. The scope of the book, its peerless prose and unique, formal inventiveness make this novel new, in the original meaning of novel.

About the Author:

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and was a bestseller in more than thirty languages worldwide.Since then Roy has published five books of influential non-fiction essays that include The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), and Broken Republic (2011). She has raised profound questions about war and peace, the definitions of "violence" and "non-violence", about what we think of as "development", "democracy", "nationalism", "patriotism" and indeed the idea of civilization itself. Roy is a trained architect. She lives in New Delhi.

Just finished the book. It's a huge range of issues from gender to Kashmir to bastar. About injustice, violence, the state against it's people. Difficult read actually. Feel like I need to read it again

It is the story of pain and suffering of ordinary people unknown to the rest.But she has to give up her one point attitude towards certain politicians. Any way it is a wonderful novel touches the heart's of reader's.

Really an utmost good piece of work from the voice of unheard and oppressed , Her Ladyship Arundhati Roy.Great one. A must buy of the year. Everyone should know somehow insecure we are. From the extreme political turmoil and corruption to now time's extreme fundamentalism. Many times we were unaware of our real situation time and again we had been dragged on the paths inked by democratic goons. Now is the time we are experiencing a similar disaster but in different tone...nationalism, thou...

Truly, this is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinent’s most brutal villains.